Customers

Fingrid is an independent actor, which serves all its customers equally. Our customers include electricity producers, grid companies, large energy consumers and other electricity market players. In addition to being able to offer affordable services that meet customer needs, we value openness, trust and active interaction with our customers.

We serve our customers in a variety of ways. We offer our customers the possibility to connect to the grid, we transmit electricity, we are in charge of maintaining continuous power balance and settling power balances, we grant guarantee-of-origin certificates, we publish electricity market information and develop information exchange on the retail markets.

During the year, we organised two major customer events and several info sessions and webinars targeted at smaller audiences concerning, among other things, the Datahub project. The theme of the Fingrid Current event in spring was the future of the electricity market and in the autumn event, the focus was on a safe, digital power system and smart grids. The spring event was attended by 220 people on site and followed by 240 people online, making it undoubtedly one of the industry’s largest events in Finland.

According to our annual customer survey, our customers are satisfied with our operations and services, with four out of five respondents willing to recommend our way of doing business with our customers. According to the survey, the trust KPI measuring the implementation of the customer strategy and customers’ trust was 3.9 on a scale of 1–5. Among the services, the scores for electricity transmission, guarantee-of-origin certificates and electricity market information had improved substantially. In relation to our customers’ expectations, we have succeeded best in active international collaboration, working for the benefit of society at large and treating our customers equally. The greatest gaps against expectations were in the cost-effectiveness of our decisions, willingness and ability to collaborate, and understanding our customers’ business.

Towards the end of the year, the decision was made to keep the transmission grid tariffs unchanged for 2018. In addition to them, connection-point-specific reactive power fees were introduced to ensure that reactive power compensation takes place cost-effectively in the locations where reactive power is generated or consumed. The cabling of distribution networks and changes in consumption have significantly increased the amount of reactive power fed into the grid.

Our goals for 2018 are to ensure the cost-effectiveness of our solutions and communicating on them, as customers clearly expressed their concern in this area in the customer satisfaction survey. In addition, we will further develop systematic interaction with customers and begin to renew our electronic service channels.

During the year, two training sessions were organised for personnel working at the customer interface, focussing on increasing customer understanding and the need for changes in our services due to changing customer needs.

Figure: Price of electricity service. Costs related to transmission system operation, such as investments, loss power, system services, but not directly related to transmission system operation, such as public service obligations, feed-in tariff for renewable energy, and peak load capacity. The comparison includes the EEA countries with a transmission system operator in charge of both a 110-kilovolt and 400-kilovolt structure.The 15 countries included in the comparison are: Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the UK.

Key events of 2017

Fingrid in the top 3 among global energy brands

Fingrid was ranked among the top three brands in the CHARGE 2017 competition organised in connection with the international energy industry’s Branding Energy seminar.

Energy sector in need of reputation boost

The Luottamus&Maine (Trust&Reputation) survey carried out in various sectors annually polls the opinions of the public. Based on the survey, the energy sector has been faced with a bit of a reputation crisis. In 2017, over 6,000 Finns responded to the survey, which covered 76 organisations.

The objective of the survey was to create an overall picture of what so-called ordinary people think about companies operating in Finland. Fingrid participates in the survey every year. Fingrid’s results, as well as those of the other actors in the sector, have declined over the past two years.

Based on the open comments, the sector and its ways of operating are quite unknown to the general population. There seems to be confusion, at least partially, as to the players, ownership and the profit sharing criteria among the public. KONE has held the top position for several years in the survey, followed by Supercell and Ponsse. Fingrid holds a middle position among the companies included in the survey.